dreamlike

Taken from the alum 'Goodbye'.

How to describe Ulrich Schnauss's music? Let's see. It's shoegazing heroes. Slowdive headlining a rave. It's krautrock plunging headlong into the celestial raptures of the Cocteau Twins. It's U2 if Brian Eno had ousted Bono and commandeered the band in 1985. It's Balearic with a view of the Baltic instead of the Mediterranean. It's art-techno for the heart as well as the head. It's stadium chillout, as immense as a festival field and as intimate as a bedroom. It's celebration and catharsis. It's vapour trails and meteor showers. And it's very, very good.
 
So far, the quietly spoken German who creates this music has operated beneath the radar. His first two albums, 2001's Far Away Trains Passing By and 2003's A Strangely Isolated Place, worked their way into record collections by stealth. People heard tracks played by Rob Da Bank or Tom Middleton, or chanced upon him on stage at the Big Chill or Bestival, or heard about him from friends. However they discovered him, they were hooked. XFM's Lauren Laverne called A Strangely Isolated Place "a life changer everyone I have forced to buy it loves it."
 
Ulrich's third album, Goodbye, is his first for Independiente. It is also the end of a chapter in his sound. "I see these three albums as moving closer to something I wanted to do right from the beginning but didn't quite manage," he says. "Merging songwriting and indie elements with electronic music. I've tried to take all the ideas to the maximum."
 
So the ambient tracks are more spacious, the songs more memorable, the multi-layered, guitar-heavy tracks more ragingly psychedelic. Just listen to the obliterating rush of Medusa, or the cloudbusting dream-pop of Stars (performed by long-time collaborator Judith Beck). At times, there are over 100 different audio tracks playing simultaneously: a tower of song. No wonder Goodbye has taken three solid years of in the studio.
 
If Ulrich hailed from somewhere less boring, things might have been different. Fortunately, he was born in 1977 in Kiel, an unprepossessing city on Germany's Baltic coast best known for its naval base. It seemed to the young Ulrich as if everything important was happening elsewhere.
 
He explains, "I was talking to Andrew Sherriff from Chapterhouse and he told me that being from Reading had a significant influence because the place was so shit that you had to create beautiful music to get out of that state of mind. I'd say the same thing for me. Kiel is probably the most boring, ugly place in the world. The whole city is grey concrete. Places like that inspire you to create something that elevates you out of reality for a few minutes."
 

Bands didn't tend to play in Kiel, but at least the NME arrived regularly at the train station, albeit four weeks late, and the british forces radio station was good. Around 1990, Ulrich discovered electronic music and shoegazing simultaneously: the Orb alongside My Bloody Valentine, 808 State next to Ride, Shades Of Rhythm beside Slowdive. He also followed up every artist namechecked by LFO in their 1991 single What Is House?: Brian Eno, Tangerine Dream, YMO His core ideas about music were forged there and then.
 
"For me that was the magic of those days," he says. "You couldn't say if a band was electronic or rock. I'm not interested in purist ideas. I like it when things you don't expect merge and mix and something new comes out of it."
 
And because he never got to see his heroes in the flesh, they maintained an aura of mystery and wonder. "You make up your own idea of how things are. For me that whole early '90s scene was something I imagined, like a fairy tale - an alternative reality to what I was experiencing."
 
Ulrich worked as a psychiatric nurse as part of his national service. After that, he moved to Berlin, where he tried in vain to become accepted by the electronic scene. "I felt really isolated. I desperately tried to integrate but it just didn't work. I was trying to marry what I wanted to do with what was trendy at the time and I always ended up with a foul compromise. So I thought I might as well do what I want to do."
 
After a few years of watered down, pseudonymous productions which he'd rather you didn't seek out, Ulrich released Far Away Trains Passing By on the dauntingly hip City Centre Offices label. He was amazed they even wanted to release it; more amazed still when it became a cult success. With its abundant charm and unabashed optimism, it was the most pleasantly surprising electronic debut since Boards of Canada's Music Has The Right To Children.
Its more rock-influenced successor, A Strangely Isolated Place, received an even warmer response, from critics and other musicians alike. It led to Ulrich remixing some of his shoegazing heroes (Neil Halstead and Rachel Goswell of Slowdive, and Mark Gardener of Ride), as well as Depeche Mode, Justin Robertson, Lunz (Hans-Joachim Roedelius), and Longview.
 
Tired of the Berlin scene, Ulrich moved back to Kiel to make Goodbye. Most of his schoolfriends had moved away, so he didn't have to worry about distractions. His last two album titles spoke of isolation, but was that the pain of enforced loneliness or the comfort of voluntary solitude? Goodbye is equally ambivalent. "Emotionally, I find farewell situations interesting," he says. "Saying goodbye can be tragic or hopeful."
 
Like its predecessors, Goodbye constructs its own world, vast and vivid. When he's making music, Ulrich sees colours: one song might be red, another blue. Next time, he wants to "record an album based on more traditional electronic music structures - which could enable me to merge all these different influences beyond recognition". Meanwhile, this is the album he's been moving towards for over a decade: a sonic tour de force, an alternative reality, a life-changer.

Ulrich Schnauss - Stars

Deadmau5 - I Remember (Vocal Mix)

Lofticries

most highly listenable reasons why WARPAINT is not only hard but IMPOSSIBLE to follow onto a stage... 

Warpaint - "Biggy" (HD) Live: in PaRiS,  2014

11 Loving You

Medicine Time Baby, Pt. 2

EP3 is out 13th/14th April 2015
Limited edition vinyl coming soon
You can buy digital here:
iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/last-light/id973941550?i=973941885

Last Light

Pre-order the new album 'It Is What It Is', released 3 April on Brainfeeder: https://thundercat.lnk.to/it-is-what-it-isSo

Ninjashop: http://found.ee/giantsroam
iTunes: http://found.ee/giantsroam-it

'Them Changes'
Written and Produced by S. Bruner / S. Ellison
Bass, Vocal - S. Bruner
Keyboards, Programming - S. Ellison
Saxophone - Kamasi Washington
Piano - Dennis Hamm

Virtuoso bassist and singer-songwriter Stephen Bruner aka Thundercat returns to the Brainfeeder fold with his first solo material in two years, having already made outstanding contributions to not one, but two, of the greatest albums of 2015 - To Pimp a Butterfly and The Epic - by fellow Los Angelians Kendrick Lamar and Kamasi Washington. 

Mini-album 'The Beyond / Where the Giants Roam' will be released digitally on Monday 22nd June via Brainfeeder.

http://brainfeeder.net/thundercat

iTunes

Thundercat - 'Them Changes'

Without Limits (Morcheeba Big Calm Remix)

From the album "In Emptiness".
Written and produced by Brian Saitzyk and John Kelley.

Rapture At Sea w/ John Kelley

Rod Laver Arena_12 August 2007

If Only Tonight We Could Sleep

Morcheeba performing The Sea, live on KRWC

Morcheeba The Sea Live

From the album KITTY HAWK.  The Fink (VIP) Remix is featured in the James Franco movie...KIN.

STREAM: https://open.spotify.com/album/3AOs267HGT5WMXdVJawoMi?si=e0IlWw7vQsKTweCXeyQ7Rw

I Wanna Run (feat. Maura Davis)

Purity Ring - Lofticries

Tamaryn - Softcore

BASSNECTAR - VAVA VOOM - NEW ALBUM - OUT NOW

Free download of "Ugly" + album bundles available at:
http://www.bassnectar.net/vava-voom/

VAVA VOOM
1. Vava Voom (ft. Lupe Fiasco)
2. Empathy
3. Ugly (ft. Amp Live)
4. Ping Pong
5. What (ft. Jansten)
6. Pennywise Tribute
7. Do It Like This (ft. ill.Gates)
8. Laughter Crescendo [2012 Version]
9. Butterfly (ft. Mimi Page)
10. Nothing Has Been Broken (ft. Tina Malia)
11. Chronological Outtakes

Vava Voom

Butterfly (feat. Mimi Page)

Love Burns ("B.R.M.C.")

Purity Ring - Lofticries (spf5Ø live AMBIENt drool edit)

'Blame It All On Love', released 20 October 2023 on Counter Records: https://poolside.lnk.to/biaolSo

First single from our debut album "Pacific Standard Time" out July 9th 2012
Get your copy of Poolside's 16 track debut album only $5 digital download here: http://poolsidemusic.com/product/pacific-standard-time-digital/

Slow Down

Bring, bring the thunder
and the loud, loud rain
Lead our walls asunder
'neath the proud, proud veins

Of traits that bleed the gunmen
of our pumping, earthly hearts
Ween our joys in plunder
Feel our shining teeth
Bet our hold on happiness

You must be hovering over yourself
Watching us drip on each other's sides
Dear brother, collect all the liquids off of the floor
Use your oily fingers
Make a paste, let it form

Let it seep through your sockets and ears
Into your precious, ruptured skull
Let it seep, let it keep you from us
Patiently heal you
Patiently unreel you

You must be hovering over yourself
Watching us drip on each other's sides
Dear brother, collect all the liquids off of the floor
Use your oily fingers
Pick up paste, let it form

dreamlike

Boski93